Friendly Fire by Revetoon

[raw]
made by Revetoon for Ludum Dare 46 (JAM)

Gameplay

Keep the fire alive by feeding it all sorts of funny objects.
Expect cool visuals and fun challenges but watch out for dangers.
Try collecting all kind of items to do the highest score !

Post your score in the comments, we are curious to see them.

Controls

Left-click : move or pick up
Right-click : drop or burn

Assets

Every asset of the game except for the skybox (which is not really visible anyways) were made by us during the Game Jam including : models, textures, animations and music/sounds.

Tools used

  • Unity
  • Blender for meshes and animations
  • Gimp for textures
  • Cubase / Audacity for musics and sounds

Note

We didn't have time to polish certain aspects of the game :
the walk animation is a bit too chaotic
Some textures could be prettier
The level design could use a little more variation

Hope you have a fun time ! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzL8L1wSML8

pic3.png

pic5.png

pic2.png

pic4.png

Cheat map

Map of all the noticable pickups doing special effects when burnt.

LD46-map.jpg

Fix Update n°1

A few fixes, after some feedbacks by our players:

  • The player is less slowed down by the weight of what he is carrying
  • Most of the items to burn have a shorter duration, in order to spice things up (as it was nearly impossible to have the fire stop before)
  • The mushrooms effect duration is fixed (it could last for 5 minutes before, now it won't last for that long)
  • Now the Logs.txt file is no longer generated by the execution of the game :)

Ratings

Overall 974th 3.589⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Fun 848th 3.5⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1006th 3.393⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Theme 402th 4.054⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1205th 3.643⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Audio 598th 3.593⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Humor 581th 3.423⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Mood 910th 3.558⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Given 39🗳️ 28🗨️

Feedback

WillyPa
21. Apr 2020 ¡ 12:11 UTC
Cool little game. I really liked when you put alot of burning things in the fire so it became really big.... Good job!
JAsonsumm1
21. Apr 2020 ¡ 12:23 UTC
Yeah really cool, I like the low poly style and the fire :D
Neisha
21. Apr 2020 ¡ 12:33 UTC
Nice game! I liked that the fire got eyes when it got bigger :D Would be cool to see what objects you are carrying and how many. Also the music fits the game perfectly! Well done!
Nurk
21. Apr 2020 ¡ 13:29 UTC
Good work ! It's fun game. The game and the concept works well. On the other hand, the slowdown is really too disabling. It's a bit long to get back to camp.
Tec
24. Apr 2020 ¡ 10:41 UTC
Really fun game! It awakens my pyromaniac instincts!
nk_x_x
24. Apr 2020 ¡ 17:29 UTC
Neat. I especially liked the little touch of the compass that appears only when you need it, solid game design idea.

It might've been good to have an angle for the gameplay to be a bit more of a challenge, or alternatively if there wasn't the threat of a timer. It'd be nice to know what order things get burned in too, as someone above said maybe an inventory of some kind. Once I felt like I'd explored most stuff, I did eventually let it run down to see what happened and it took ages :P

The sound design and music was great, and honestly really loved the little character's walk animation, was totally charming. The mushrooms were a fun addition too.
🎤 Revetoon
24. Apr 2020 ¡ 20:14 UTC
Thank you guys for thying our game, it is much appreciated ! We made a quick fix based on your feedbacks.
@nk-x-x @neisha We didn't really want to complicate things with an inventory system, but you are right it would be useful to have a way to visualise the items you are currently holding, we will keep that idea for future updates if we decide to continue with this project :)
BigQuacko
24. Apr 2020 ¡ 23:11 UTC
Loved the music and all the little touches you put in as the fire grew. Had fun exploring round the area as well too. Would've liked an indicator as to how much i could carry though. Solid game overall, good job!
Emperor Eagle
24. Apr 2020 ¡ 23:45 UTC
Good game! I like how the fire gets bigger and burns down nearby trees, the compass, the lighting across the different areas, and the ground texture, all really cool! The game is fun and keeps you playing with exploration for new items in new areas. Improvements: item count perhaps, and a easier pickup system (bigger clickable area per item). Overall, I was happy playing it and it is a good entry, great job!
GameCarpenter
26. Apr 2020 ¡ 03:01 UTC
Fire blocked the selection text that was telling you that you were actually selecting the fire. Made it difficult to actually feed it at some point. The fun of the mechanics all seemed to be in doing things you ought not to do =P. The objects found mechanic which felt like the main progress(?) wasn't very clear as far as I could tell about what a thing to find was, and when you found one.
PeterBuo
26. Apr 2020 ¡ 22:06 UTC
Beautiful work
Eran Haas
26. Apr 2020 ¡ 22:32 UTC
Great mood, and lots of cool vfx work!

The fiddly text boxes were kind of distracting, but I started to really like the glitchy walk cycle, it felt like it matched the sureal mood pretty well, and gave the little guy some personality/
Pepperpwni
27. Apr 2020 ¡ 02:00 UTC
This game has some charm! Being able to read the descriptions of items was challenging, but once I got the hang of it, there was a lot of humor to glean from some of the items. It was fun to experiment with different items to throw in the fire and the fire doesn't die down too quickly, so the core gameplay loop is relatively relaxing and encourages multiple playthroughs. Good work!
KDgame
28. Apr 2020 ¡ 00:26 UTC
This game is awesome and addicting! I love the graphics and the music. I think it would be better if you add path finding to the player!
Duke
28. Apr 2020 ¡ 11:41 UTC
Hey fellow "Friendly Fire" game creators ;)
I liked the concept and was intrigued in the beginning. Searching for flame fuel and feeding the fire. I liked how the growing fire had an actual impact on the world. Great love for details! The main problem was, that the game got tedious rather quickly. The distances you have to run to get items increases with each iteration and the walking speed gets really slow if you pick stuff up. It was very frustrating near the end. I had the at over 200 when I had enough. I think the game would benefit from a more compact level and/or better means to get around more quickly. The UI was a bit strange with the bubbles appearing the actual level. That often lead to clipping issues. But aside from that, the art was rough but adequate.

All things considered, I did have fun for the time I played. It just over stood it's welcome a little. An upgrade system to travel further and quicker would be awesome!
JojoPalambas
28. Apr 2020 ¡ 17:32 UTC
@duke

Thank you for playing and for your comment!

Actually, as we spent a lot of time on aesthetics, music and other details even at the beginning, the level was created a few hours before release and we could only then test the game in real conditions for the first time... That was a mistake, and we realized that, although we are proud of many things in this game, the gameplay was actually not that good and boring at some point.

If I may give a shield to my coworker @revetoon, I made the UI and he told me many times to change it, exactly for the same reasons as you... Every time I felt like I had better to do, but it is right that I should have taken the time to make the UI more convenient and less intruding :)

Thank you for all, it is because of comments like this that we won't make the same mistakes twice :D
SaltFactory Studio
29. Apr 2020 ¡ 02:52 UTC
Loved the music track during the game. Overall a neat and fun game with interesting gameplay. I liked the unique items scattered around the map that has different effects. Nice work!
NaBo369
29. Apr 2020 ¡ 09:32 UTC
This was a very fun game to play, the music was upbeat and the level was made in a way which really kept me interested in finding out what was left to find.

Some other people already mentioned the UI so it's unnecessary to hammer on about that, something else I did notice however was when I tried to put down wooden crates they always fell through the floor. It's a minor thing and only a small bother which didnt impact the gameplay.

So well done on making this great game!
Also I had a highscore of 257
larsspawn
30. Apr 2020 ¡ 04:42 UTC
hehe I love how the lil dude walk around the terrain like that. I've seen "keep the fire alive" games but this one... is more interesting. It seems like if the player put too much fuel then the fire starts to heat up and will burn the place down. The map is huge and player can discover something new. I can't carry more objects and i don't even know what objects I'm carrying, it would be nice to put some UI that indicates the max amount of objects you can carry. Overall Nice and interesting game!
jeroenpx
09. May 2020 ¡ 14:01 UTC
Quite a fun game! The controls and mechanics worked pretty well and it was quite fun to run around and collect stuff to put on the fire.
I really liked the details like the eyes of the fire or the fact that I was killed by an explosion.
The fire also looked great and there was a surprising amount of content in the game.

Some things did bother me a bit though...

For example, some objects though the player had to be really close to be able to pick them up, first running into them for a while before he even tried to pick them up.
Especially coffins where you could only pick those up if you came from the short side. Maybe simply increase the radius for those?

A bit linked to the previous one, but it made it quite confusing to know whether the player was just running into an object or whether his inventory was full. I also kind of didn't expect him to run slower, maybe because you couldn't actually see that he was carrying something, he just walked slower...
Maybe a bit of a controversial opinion, but instead of an indication of how much he is carrying, what about removing those limits? Personally, I am not sure that they added anything to how fun the game was.

On the graphics side, those were pretty nice and the effects looked great. A lot of effort seems to have gone in those, and there were quite a lot of them, even a tree dissolve effect.
On the other hand, the character looked naked which felt a bit strange compared to the other graphics.
Maybe simply assigning some vertex colors to some faces of the character would have made it look like he was wearing clothes?

Those are all small remarks. I enjoyed it a lot! Good job!