Crazy Running Cow by Vollfeiw

| About the Game |
CONTROLS : Arrow Keys <- | ->
The game is a crossover between an infinite runner and arcade racing games like micromachine.
Your goal is to stay alive to grind score while avoiding to not staying alive. Milk is good, bombs goes boom !

drifting cow, yay !
| About the Jam / Author |
LD Jam 46 was my first jam, 2 months after starting game dev. Now, time has change as i litteraly not completed a single game since.
Had a lot of side projects, mainly web apps, preventing me from coding for a long time without going crazy. I took the choice to learn Blender / Modeling / Rigging in my free time instead of using Unity. And here we are, my first ever 3D games .. with 2D gameplay .. because ... reasons ?
Anyway, this was a lot of fun, I hope i'll get rid of my inconsistent art style for my next games. This one was a pain, up to 5 hours to get light baked, and a fail during my nap time. 2 GPU crash, one time with wrong settings.
Have fun and see you next round !
Disclaimer : I used sfx that i did not create this jam : animal noise. I tried to record myself, but my mic is really, really awful, and didn't got something really enjoyable. I altered it so it's not just used, but yeah, some of my sfx are not handmade. If you feel like it's not fair, feel free to downvote my audio. If you don't care, don't judge animals sound please, as they're not from me.
Don't forget to share your score, here's my best at the time of I published it !
Also, here's my favorite tested game so far : * Glitch Loop * Caterpillar Cowboy * Roundabout Rowdy

Ratings
| Overall | 179th | 3.667⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 129th | 3.721⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 341th | 3.226⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 312th | 3.581⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 87th | 4.012⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 215th | 3.325⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 69th | 3.651⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 175th | 3.488⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 66🗨️ |
Yeah, at first, the cow was sliding way more, but it was too difficult to control it after some times.
I think i'll finish this game after the LD47 with Coop, i'll correct some issues with lightnings and sounds, i'll change some texture, and i'll do fully controllable character. If i'm not lazy of course.
In order to provide a bit of feedback and places this could potentially improve:
1. The run animation was just slightly 'off' or jerky something about how the legs moved.
2. The run sound didnt match the pace of the feet at all
3. The animation speed of the running could perhaps change the faster you go.
4. Hitting the fences caused 2x too much damage imho.
Those are all nitpicks though. The graphics and mood were amazing and it had really fun racing mechanics. Well done and thank you!
### Running it on Mac ###
I wasn't able to get it running in Safari but it ran fine in Chrome on Catalina
Yeah, i had some problems with animation, i'm not really good at it, and the first running animation i made was too slow, and when i speed it up, it was weird, with the fact that bone weight around legs is really broken. Didn't got the time to redo the model.
About the running sound, yeah, just put a loop, i wanted to speed it or slow to match the speed and the feet, but changing the pitch make it sounds weird, so i kept the "best overall", even if this doesn't match.
Really thank you for your feedback @fabdynamic, this will really be helpfull wif i keep the project up.
Nice entry, controlling the cow feels a bit clumsy but that's the point, so it makes it quite fun.
Does the difficulty rises up as you complete more loops? didn't feel like it but I might be wrong.
Acceleration is greater in the beginning, while slowing down once you reach "the spot" where i think the difficulty should be (around 5 laps). However, you can have a slow down bonus. Sadly, i'ts all RNG, and if you can come up with one or more at every laps, well, it feels like taking forever to speed up. You have on average 3 bonus per laps and around 1 of 8 chance to get slow down bonus, wich should give you around one slow down every 3 laps.
On first laps, the slow down bonus decrease by the speed you get on average with one lap, while in the end game, it decrease the speed you get on average with 3 laps. If my math are done correctly, you get on average enough slow down to keep the game running forever once you hit the sweet spot.
If you find it too easy to control and anticipate things when you're at that sweet spot then yes, sadly, i didn't come with idea to increase difficulty without being unfair or breaking the game.
So yeah, in the end, balancing the game was pretty rough, i added panic system so when you take damage and recover HP you still have a drawback for failing, it's kinda like a hidden health somewhere.
If you come up with some idea to slowly increase the difficulty without breaking everything up, it's all welcome.
Long answer for a simple question, thanks for the feedback !
I could somehow works on a system that drop more bombs as time goes by, i think that less milks would be unfair but adding extra spots when bombs could spawn behind or in front of milks as the number of laps increase could be a great way to increase difficulty for sure.
I always ask for some friends that are mostly casual gamer to playtest my game to get a review of the difficulty, and it's hard to get things perfect.
But The Cow handles like a fine drift car!
The game is pretty well polished for the timeframe. The animations were not perfect, but most games don't even have animations... So I can't complain too much
One suggestion: on itch.io enable "click to launch in fullscreen" I would love to play this in fullscreen

You already got a lot of feedback on the controls, which I won't repeat. Using the speed of the cow as a difficulty modifier (which can both be affected by player performance) was an interesting extra addition to the basic mechanics.
One nitpick I have, is that the "grass tufts" looked distinct enough to look like power ups, so it was sometimes a bit confusing when I spotted them on the track.
All in all, it is a fun game, with an interesting concept and take on the theme!
Really like the use of the particle effects and lights. Would be fun to have things you could smash through without punishment, as I liked the bomb explosion, but had to avoid it survive!
Also the arcade style notifications of speed boosts etc is a nice touch that integrates well into the game and is cooler than having it on a UI.
Very solid entry.
Yeah, considering all comments, i should have put some props reacting to physics, and some ragdolls too.
About orthographic view, at some time, i switch back to a perspective view, then back to an orthographic view again, it was easier to predict turns with an orthographic view, even if we loose a bit of the 3D world.
As for the arcade style popup, thank you, it was inspired by ARPG to be honest, at first, it was looking at camera, but was looking like it was part of the ui, mainly cause of the ortographic view style i guess.
Again, thanks for feedbacks :)
The controls are a little bit cumbersome, but it's a part of the fun. The graphics look neat, the models are cool and particle effects add a lot to the overall game feel.
Great job! It was fun to play.
Yeah, about that lights, i knew that was too bright, but after more than 5 hours of burning my gpu on light baking, i decided that it was enough for now xD
Your cows are cute too bro ;)
Yeah controls are .. kinda special. It playable using a controller, wich make it a little bit smoother, however, menu doesn't work with controller.
@smiley405 Thank you, if you play a while, you can share your score :D
Rainbow power up is awesome! :rainbow: :cow:
@fumybulb Thank you ! Rainbow power up is the best ! :rainbow:
I keep in mind all the improvement that could be done with a game of this genre, but I think the base game itself looks more like a couch / party game, rather than an arcade / highscore game. So yeah, "more obstacle" could be a great idea to expends what already exist, and it will probably be done at some point, but I think other player could also be a great twist, and could lead to a game where, kinda like speedrunners, you just try to survive longer than other player.
I don't know yet, i'm experimenting with procedural generation on a platformer game right now, I'll probably get back on this game after that, because it went way better than expected, and it's a great start for a project, but, almost everything have to be redone from scratch. All these feedbacks will be a great source of idea.
And yeah, for the lap completion, I have to remake the entire popup system, right now it's just an animation with a self destroy function at the end.
And again, thanks for the feedback, i really appreciate it :D
Hey, thank you, sorry for the delayed response, and yeah, I can't do jam cause I don't have much assets to work with, so I often starts with nothing. I don't have friends, and, i'm not really sure i could do any better even with an extra days.
If i get more confident in next jams, i may ask a friend to join me on a jam to give me more time at programming while he make models / sprites / texture but, that's not for now ^^