Portal Madness by Raniere
Sounds are important to guide you throughout the game, so USE HEADPHONE! :)
You are lost in a portal maze and you must find a way out...
This is our very first game in LundumDare Jam.
Hope you like!! :)
| Youtube | https://ranierepsa.itch.io/portal-madness |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/portal-madness |
Ratings
| Overall | 1450th | 2.953⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1330th | 2.833⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1304th | 2.833⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 935th | 3.5⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1429th | 2.545⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 978th | 2.742⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 911th | 2.536⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1427th | 2.589⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 38🗨️ |
But it is very hard btw)
Congrats on your first game jam!
Ultimately the game just comes down to guess-and-check and memory. There aren't any hints as to what the right path is, and there aren't any distinctive features of the rooms, so you can't even use things like mnemonics to try and remember the right path - you just have to do it by brute force, or by using Notepad or similar to record the right path.
To be honest, I think more thought would have to be put into this for it to stand as it's own game. As it stands, it's just thoughtless guess-and-check gameplay.
For my second idea, instead of having the "wrong" portals simply send you back to the first room, have all the portals go to different rooms, even if they end up looping on each other. This would help make it feel like a real "maze" in the sense that there are multiple routes throughout it, although I could see this being difficult to program especially with NxN maze sizes. Perhaps you could just have a real "maze" generated in the background as a reference, and then, have each position in the maze just be a random room, with the portals moving your "technical" maze position based on direction and looping to a previous room if it isn't a valid direction in the background maze. I know this isn't explained very well; I guess what I am saying is just for there to perhaps be no real "wrong" portals which send you to the start, for it to be like a more traditional maze, with multiple correct and incorrect routes. Sounds tricky to program, I know, but I thought I'd just throw the idea out there.
This definitely fits the theme, and I did enjoy figuring out the way out even if it is more of a "dummy" puzzle game, where you are doomed to fail several times, as opposed to a clever one. That isn't meant to be an insult, that is just what I like to call trial and error kind of puzzles, my entry is a dummy puzzle game also. :laughing: I had fun with this, you did a good job for your first ludum dare entry!
Having the rooms laid out with relation to others in space is __almost__ getting somewhere interesting, but the player doesn't have to use it in this game. If there were some rule that made using the visual cues of where you are relevant, then that would go a long way!