Frankenstorm by TerraCottaFrog
NOTE: The joke that the first boss tells was added 20 minutes after the deadline.
The previous one was physically painful, reading "get ready for some cloud computing."
It made no sense. Judge it accordingly.
Your creator wants to make more monsters, but, alas, the weather is not cooperating.
MAKE IT
Combat clouds and capture them into the Box of Torment to power your evil creator's experiments.
Of course, normally good old thunderstorms will do the trick, but there have been very slim pickings recently.
Controls
Use left and right to move, and up to jump.
Hold Z down to fire, and release it to capture stunned clouds.
Dangers
Do not get hit by electricity or electrified water! You have infinite lives, but it increases the death count.
Have fun!
| Windows | https://terracottafrog.itch.io/frankenstorm |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/frankenstorm |
Ratings
| Overall | 94th | 3.789⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 30th | 3.95⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 208th | 3.368⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 381th | 3.421⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 46th | 4.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 38th | 3.85⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 79th | 3.421⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 88th | 3.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
Hate to rain on tour parade!
I'll have to kill you, THUNDERstand?
This game is great and I love it.It looks great, it's fun and the voices are amazing. It's a bit too short, though
My only complaint has to do with the death system. I was a bit surprised that you didn't add a leaderboard for # of deaths, which would have been a solution to the infinite deaths. At some point, dying ended up becoming a strategy, which shouldn't have been the case. I'm not saying a leaderboard was necessary, but maybe it could also have taken power to respawn (after all, Dr. Frankenstein could have used some of the power to make more creations).
As far as the gameplay, I liked the balancing of trying to attack while still collecting clouds at the same time. You would have to stop shooting in order to capture clouds, which almost reminded me of Splatoon 2's Salmon Run, which had a similar mechanic, although explored in a completely different way. You also had to keep moving to make sure you weren't trapped in the middle of a storm of rain or lightning. Overall, it was a really fun experience. Great job!
However, measured among your outstanding earlier entries it feels a bit less coherent gameplay-wise. The fact that you cannot die takes a lot of tension out of the game. On the other hand, if I were to judge a game targeted for younger kids (the graphics would fit perfectly), then this design decision would make a lot of sense. So take this comment with a grain of salt.
It's still an awesome, well polished game.
SFx are cute, as @cerno-b mentioned, that makes a perfect fit for a game targeted for a younger audience but adds a certain charm to the game world in any case.
The sole negative I can find is that the lightning distribution was unfair some of the time... Between round 20 and 30 I couldn't make it through a wave of lightning without dying even once :/
Pretty cool entry :thumbsup:
I got stuck in the level with the big cloud, I kept on dying and I couldn't suck any clouds.
PS: please make the source code available
The risk/reward mechanic of collecting when you're not shooting was genius! It was also amazing to have only one action button. And so many levels, and boss fights! Wow.
Very very well-done!
If I had to give some feedback is that the rain drops' randomess was really unforgiving, it killed more than every other thing. Every time I died to the rain I felt it wasn't fair, but it wasn't frustrating enough due to having infinite lives. The downside is that as someone said before it makes it lack tension and that is something that most shmups depend on, without it you don't feel like you have to dodge the incoming attacks.
And a real small thing is that I would have liked to have an additional X for the jumping as my mind was too focused on dodging with the right hand that I forgot that I could jump. Overall I really liked this one, the sfx didn't get old for me and the graphics looked great, I like your style. Great Job!
Having those pitched up voices was pretty funny, later in the game it gets a bit old as all the voice acting you hear is pitched up.
The soundtrack is ok, but nothing special.
The art is standing out here, many cool particle effects and small animations really bring this game to life.
The game has great controls and accurate hitboxes, feels good and is fun.
Your enemies also get different attack patterns the further you progress which is great, however it would be nice to have different attack patterns as a play too. You just keep holding the button to shoot all of the time.
Another point of criticism is, that the game is rather easy, later enemies get a more difficult attack pattern that's true, but there is no penalty in dying.
Overall really good stuff! With potential for being even better :)
It reminds me of an old GameMaker game called Puffy Star Speed, which I'll upload once I reboot Windows. I did find a link to it online, but the site seems really dodgy, so I thought it best not to take chances.
EDIT: Here's a link for Puffy Star Speed. It runs on my machine, hopefully it will run on yours :) I downloaded it from the original source about 10 years ago, so it's certainly safe.
https://app.box.com/s/1ho1yihx4ba2refwjqjuqezjlw8ce14r
didnt notice anything diferente from the diferente characters you control, maybe missing something