Spike Spire by Acuity
Description: Get the trinket at the top of the tower! This game is too hard, leave a comment if you are able to beat it! I think the hardest part is jumping over 4 spikes in the upper left corner - it's doable, but very difficult. The world itself is only two screens (therefore Small World).
Controls: Arrow keys to move. Z to shoot, but for now the bullets can't destroy anything.
Notes: Sorry, I made the game too hard... all the jumps are doable and the game is winnable, but a few of the jumps are especially tough. Also, the spike hitboxes are squares, so it might look like you clip them more than you should. If I had time, I would figure out how to do checkpoints and maybe add levels with shootable enemies.
Production: Music was made in around an hour using FL Studio, and will be up on my soundcloud later. Also, I didn't have time to make art, so please enjoy the placeholder animated sprite!
I also spent a lot of time figuring out how to make strafing backwards while shooting work when you hold both arrows, but because of time constraints, I didn't get to design interesting enemies to shoot.
Finally did one good run and got 48 seconds! Here's what the whole stage looks like together:
Links
GAME: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Acuity/spike-spire
SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/acuitynpc/spikespire
SOURCE CODE: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/407tmppz0o1752b/AABCzEj5YQWO6kmIulmO33m5a?dl=0
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/spike-spire |
Ratings
| Overall | 501th | 2.655⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 397th | 2.8⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 534th | 1.862⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 533th | 2.138⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 501th | 2.367⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 59th | 3.759⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 368th | 2.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 458th | 2.519⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
I think you've got a good feel for level design - each section felt like a step up in difficulty from the last. I think if you smoothed out the difficulty a bit you'd have a great game that keeps challenging the player to push themselves a bit further than they think they can go.
Overall, I like the level design; it's just a bit too hard too fast I think. Also, the character placeholder art gave me a chuckle. Cool entry. :thumbsup:
The game is REAAAAAALLLY hard. I am a reasonable patient person, but i already predicted i would ragequit this game after a minute.
My suggesting is to think about making it fun for your player instead of making it challenging. Add a very basic checkpoint mechanism. Make sure you player want to Keep playing and play it to the end!
Good luck!
Separate jump button would have been nice and even restarting with any button after death. Also, having several different hand drawn frames of placeholder sprites for the "character" instead of one even semi finished sprite is kind of a weird choice.
Pretty cool music. I'm kind of jealous as a solo game dev with zero musical talent.
As suggested by many of you, adding a checkpoint would definitely improve the difficulty and reduce frustration, I still haven't found the time to figure out the code for that (have to save coordinates to respawn the player at the right location, and remove and make a new player object I think?). I definitely will try to figure this out because I'll need checkpoints if I want to make a longer platformer like this.
And yea, @antti-haavikko the jump is a little bit floaty and the spikes are just square hitboxes (which might be why it feels so punishing). I'll have to think about how to change around parameters next time to make things still work out and feel smoother.
Nice work :thumbsup:
Rate me at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/survival-game
First, music is cool :)
After, as said in the comments, I think it's very (maybe too much) hard.
You should also maybe improve movements, cause sometime the player get slow down by the ground.
Jump mechanic works well.
I could be a great platformer if it would be easier :)
However I enjoyed the music and the art style though minimal it works its purpose. Nice!
I'd recommend to read this as well: http://higherorderfun.com/blog/2012/05/20/the-guide-to-implementing-2d-platformers/
Thank you.
But the game is waaaaaay too hard (speaking as someone who played a lot of 2D platformers) ! Those who told me my entry was too hard surely didn't play this one ;-)
The physics engine seems solid, and the character is pleasant to control.
The graphics are simple but clean.
And also, clever idea about using screen wrapping!
It seems like you reached 20 votes already though. :)
I played this on stream at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/141703264 - time 1:37:15
That about sums up my play-trough. It reminds me a little of I wanna be the guy, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who you ask. But I enjoyed it! Good job!
I agree that the game needed a lot more frequent checkpoints, and perhaps a bit more forgiving jump height, especially since a lot of factors can go wrong in terms of unresponsive controls, lag, that is not necessarily within the player's control (my game was skipping a couple frames and it made some passages frustrating to go through). Regardless, this doesn't seem like it is one of the most difficult of these sorts of spike platformers, particularly because it is very small scale, but I have yet to beat it, so maybe it will frustrate me if I was to try and beat it (which I might, later. :D).
@sgstair Whoa, thanks for streaming! I didn't realize how hard some of the jumps are since I've played each one many times to test - definitely good insight for me to see your stream!
@random-storykeeper Oh yea, I remember you from the last few OHCs I participated in! I haven't been able to participate in quite a while, but maybe I can pop in again sometime. Yea, my game definitely could use checkpoints (that's the next thing I'm going to figure out when I add to this), and I think the metre in the music is something like 3 3 2 in a measure, which is pretty much like 3 followed by 5 like you said. And huh, I didn't realize the death sound was that loud, I'll have to scale it down in the future! And yea, the controls are a bit sensitive, and the spikes are unforgiving, I'll have to tone it down! Thanks for commenting!
https://soundcloud.com/acuitynpc/spikespire