Long Long: A snake lies in the Past by Tapehead
FIRST OF ALL
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Thank you very much everybody for such great and constructive feedback to our entry. We appreciate and read every single one of them. We want to get better and make better games in the future and you guys helped us get to the next step in the process.
We reworked and updated our game with better controls, more checkpoints, and much more.
DESCRIPTION
===========
Go on an epic long Adventure Puzzle with Long - the ridiculously long and always growing snake. Crawl through mystic woods, find the magical sword, fight through terrifying dungeons and help the princess in danger.
please rate / vote and comment - thanks
2 guys made everything within the 72 hours (except the music)
CONTROLS
========
[arrow/wasd] move
[spacebar/right ctrl] action
============
Thank you very much everybody for such great and constructive feedback to our entry. We appreciate and read every single one of them. We want to get better and make better games in the future and you guys helped us get to the next step in the process.
We reworked and updated our game with better controls, more checkpoints, and much more.
DESCRIPTION
===========
Go on an epic long Adventure Puzzle with Long - the ridiculously long and always growing snake. Crawl through mystic woods, find the magical sword, fight through terrifying dungeons and help the princess in danger.
please rate / vote and comment - thanks
2 guys made everything within the 72 hours (except the music)
CONTROLS
========
[arrow/wasd] move
[spacebar/right ctrl] action
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.67 | 205 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.77 | 137 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.19 | 487 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 4.49 | 54 |
| Humor(Jam) | 3.59 | 125 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.48 | 265 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.58 | 242 |
| Theme(Jam) | 4.09 | 158 |
The sound when Long hit something made +1 star on Humor, though :D
Nice entry, well played!
Maybe more checkpoints, or making it clear when you reach one, could help this game be even better!
Also, +1 for Snake in his box...!
haha solid says thank you!
That would maybe be less of an issue if you got some time to look around when entering an(new)area but you instantly have to move. (And probably screw yourself over because of that)
Lastly I think it would have been nice if the snake moved smoother. A few weeks ago I made a snake game in Python and what I did was make the speed 1/X th of the tile size and only allow the character to change direction when 'on grid'. It's practically the same but there are more frames where the character moves. (Which I personally enjoy more)
Overall very nice entry!
The worst is when you see the sword glistening in the middle of the screen and you slither up to the pedastal and... die? It would have been a funny joke, if you didn't get sent back so many screens. Then you just seem like a dick. Like, do you really hate your players that much?
Thanks!
Yeah the sword screen - it was planned as a funny joke but turned out to be one of the frustrating moments in the game. Sorry that it hit you as well. We put a lot of Energy to make the Sword as glistening as it is haha. We should have made the Checkpoint instead.
and no - we dont hate our players - WE REALLY APPRECIATE EVERY PLAYER who gives our game a try! We are in an early stage of becoming a Game Developer and we will learn from that mistakes... promised!
Thanks again for playing!
Tell me on Twitter when you fixed that, I'll retry it then!
(seriously I keep dying because I can't think fast enough on what button to press to get to that direction. a noob, I said)
That said, and while I didn't go far due to my noobness, this game is great and really fun to play. Graphics are stunning, audio fits well, I liked. gj!
Loved the music and art, because as a programmer, I really struggle with those things.
I would really like it if you could tell me how you made the game just start at whatever size you choose instead of opening up the choose window size thing in the beginning. I would really like to make sure everyone who plays my game has the same width-to-height ratio, but I don't know how to do that with Unity. Thanks!
Overall great entry. Play with the controls and that timer to make a pretty sweet game!
we have already some ideas how to improve the controls and the feedback for the player about the movement and it should be a improvement for the whole game
and we thinking about to make a post mortem for our game, so we will inform you :)
-Kaz
And to reiterate the same complaint once again, this really ought to have a checkpoint in every room, considering the timing isn't very precise and leads to tons of fake difficulty. Having to replay 3+ rooms in a row all the time is nearly a game-breaking flaw here.
I'd call it "Snake - Story Mode". It's a pitty my patience left me somewhere in the middle of the game, so I couldn't see the whole picture. It would be nice, if you had an easy mode, to help others rate more game faster.
I'm sure that if the game was a bit less delayed I would have enjoyed it more!
Using A to turn left and B to turn right didn't feel natural to me. I was forced to always think where I wanted to move, to which direction I had to turn and which button I had to play. There was usually no enough time to do that.
Text boxes and switches just made it worse. While on a streak, moving was quite OK. But I usually had to turn pretty quickly after any of those, but I had already lost my flow, by then...
If input was reconfigurable (which is pretty easy to do in Unity), I could had used the gamepad shoulder buttons and it would map much more naturally to the action.
Other than that, I don't have much to say... Cool graphics and audio, and (again) neat idea.
Despite this, I've really liked how you managed to blend to seemingly unrelated games with amazingly polished art and sound and some nice humorous bits. Well done!
The obvious fix for difficulty is to place more checkpoints, that would solve a lot of the issues. I'd say at least twice as many. You could probably make it a bit easier by having the game timed with the music too, and having audio cues (i.e. some sound every time the snake moved), although you have to do that well for it to work.
I played it twice, gave up at the first place at the forest part with two switches. Then the second time I played it got past there, only to not be able to jump because my keyboard doesn't seem to be able to detect control and alt being pressed at the same time. Not sure why you picked only those buttons, and chose to disable reconfiguring the controls. I tried to play with my mouse, and I managed to jump then, but it was still too hard, I would often turn instead of jump so I gave up.
Who made the music? Did someone on your team, or did you get it from somewhere else? It's pretty good, probably the best part of the game.
I liked this game and the idea when I first played it, but got a little grumpy after dying too much :P
I think the best way to not make mistakes like this with difficulty is to get other people to play your game during the competition. In fact, I'd say that you really can't make a good Ludum Dare game without getting other people to play it.
Another thing is often I would skip the text because I happened to move as the text came up.
What killed it for me was just how tedious it became, almost immediately. (Of course I want to pick up all the gems, but that's beside the point! :) ) The checkpoints should've been more forgiving, or every level, honestly. Or there could be an option to go faster when you already did a level ten times.
Oh well, it's pretty.
Checkpoints should be on any level or after the moving statues.
About controls. Maybe some quick quiet sound for move would help to keep up the tempo. It's hard to follow the beat especially with ambient music changing its pace.
you're the best!
Awesome work : great idea, well polished game, nice music, beautiful art, lot of stuff and HUMOR! Congrats!
The only problem I found here was the lack of checkpoints but it seems you already know the issue.
Keep working on it, it's so cool!
My only complaint would lies in the difficulty of the game: the two buttons controls make it quite hard to play (harder than the traditionnal 4 buttons snake), so it would be nicer for players to restart on the last screen than from a checkpoint, which can sometimes be very frustrating to restart 4 or 5 five screen because you mixed up "left" with "right" button.
Anyway, excellent entry overall, i love it!
Besides that, really great zelda inspired graphics and story. Overall really well polished.
we already released a first reworked version here http://wearetapehead.itch.io/long-long-a-snake-lies-in-the-past
feel free to check it out!
The lack of checkpoints was beyond cruel - dying after being taught how to jump resulted in jumping back to the 2-button puzzle, which was hard enough the first time around! Timing was also extremely difficult after pressing a button or exiting a cutscene - it was frustrating, to say the least.
Regardless, I think the idea was very sound and as I mentioned above I loved the graphics work. Keep it up - try to be a little more forgiving towards your players in future, though!
A tribute to the classics, neat pixelart, easy to learn the controls but hard to master, and the audio is just great!
Great job there guys, I love it :)
http://wearetapehead.itch.io/long-long-a-snake-lies-in-the-past