Eleventh Second by Jeremy Ryan
Overview
Play as Nekoro, a time-traveling ninja cat of justice. The evil Doctor Kikai has planted a mega-bomb at the top of the city clocktower, and you must scale the tower to defuse it. With only seconds until the detonation, you must use your Timestepper to steal a few extra seconds.
This is a direct sequel to my LD50 submission, Eleventh Hour. If you're interested, you can check that one out too!
If you start losing sound effects, try restarting the game! PyGame has a limited number of sound channels, and I accidentally leak one with every restart when I start playing wind noises. Game jam code!
:joystick: Download the game (Windows) :joystick:
Controls
- Mouse: Use your grappling kunai
- R: Reset
Credits
Made by me for the 48-hour compo. Some of the assets resemble ones from the "prequel" (like the player poses), but everything in the game has been made from scratch for LD51.
- Framework: PyGame/Python
- Art: Paint.NET
- Audio: SFXR, Audacity, my Casio keyboard
- Fonts: Alef, Voyager, SevenSegment, a couple others that I rasterized and can't remember for sure...
Special Thanks
Games are made "from scratch," but they're not made in a vacuum. Here are a few games I used for inspiration:
- Hollow Knight: The main character's grappling movement was at least partially inspired by Hornet.
- Celeste: When designing the particles, I was thinking of the gondola scene where you float a feather with your breath. I also highly recommend the pixel art tutorials by these guys!
- Lazerstorm: Former ScoreSpace jam winner. I used some of the explosions as reference.
- My own games: I borrowed the tutorial style and vertical runner concept from Luminary and the subject matter from Eleventh Hour.
| Link | https://github.com/jeremycryan/LD51 |
| Link | https://plasmastarfish.itch.io/eleventh-second |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/eleventh-second |
Ratings
| Overall | 8th | 4.235⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 13th | 4.206⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 123th | 3.618⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 62th | 4.103⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 4th | 4.6⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 8th | 4.368⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 8th | 4.329⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 47🗨️ |
Verdict: You should release this as an app
Thanks for playing!
Nice Audio and Graphics, particles used perfectly, simple but entertaining gameplay.
By far the best game here i've seen so far.
Only little thing i have to complain about is the keyboard usage on a mouse based game, every reset felt a little bit bad because of that - is there any reason why you didn't just chose clicks as input instead of Enter and R ?
@thoastbot To be completely honest, because the menus and resetting were the absolute last thing I implemented and I just didn't think about it haha. "R" is common for resets, and I just didn't think about the potential annoyance until it was shipped.
Glad you liked everything else though!
I really enjoyed this game.
507 is the furthest I could make it.
Minor gripe is that the tutorial message flashed past, so I was a little confused at the start, regardless I understood the gameplay very quickly. Also, if possible a Linux / MacOS build is very much appreciated as well.
We feel the speed while playing, the effects are crazy good :)
I also really liked the way you used the theme.
I enjoyed playing thanks !
I like the music on its own, but it doesn't quite fit the gameplay to me.
You can get to a position where there is no way forward when the only platform is at the bottom of the screen.
Also, I really would have liked to have full screen mode, as I died so many times when clicking out of the window's top or bottom
Otherwise, nice game. Gameplay loop kept me engaged for long time. Also, this would probably convert very well for mobile. I liked the graphics and the music & sfx that were a continuum from your last game :)
I will say I don't *think* there's a way to get it into a state that's impossible to move forward --- or at least I haven't seen one. It might require some precise timing to grab a low platform at the last possible second to scroll up. The platforms probably do get too spaced out toward the end.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
It's a little tricky near the end when there's just a single platform on the bottom end of the screen. I don't know if it's impossible, but I was never quite skilled enough to pull that off.
Still, after a handful of tries I was able to reach the top of the clock tower. :) I had a wonderful time playing this. Well done!
After switching to full screen I finished the game in my second try :slight_smile:
p.s. That song is so beautiful! Reminds me of compositions of the legendary finnish youth-gospel music composer Pekka Simojoki.
Glad you liked the music. I was originally going to do something closer to [Eleventh Hour](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/eleventh-hour) and have a more intense, electronic sound... but ran out of time so decided to just record my keyboard because it was quicker.
(Speaking of which, thanks @juxipolo and @paul-nadan for the feedback on the music... I agree! Would have loved to have made something more suspenseful for the gameplay and kept the piano version for just the "you win" screen)
I thought this was an endless arcade game like icy tower and I set a personal goal of 1k feet. I didn't expect it to be the actual goal. An endless mode with leaderboard could be a thing
I thought the game was rigged past 900 feet. Ball generation is very random and chaotic; sometimes you get one right where you land 10 times in a row, and sometimes you don't get any because you quickjumped past them all. You can catch balls mid jump but it's cheesy
And sometimes there were multiple platforms on top of each other, and sometimes they were very scarce. These platforms were so low I don't think it was possible to move forward unless you latched to an offscreen platform above
I think world generation could be a bit more pseudorandom, but it's not a big deal
The batteries had a flat chance of spawning (I believe 15% of all platforms near the end) but also a failsafe for bad luck (near the end, you can't get seven platforms in a row with no battery).
The platform spacing had a constant minimum distance between platforms, and the maximum increased as you went up (probably a bit too much).
See method spawn_new_platform() in [the code](https://github.com/jeremycryan/LD51/blob/main/frame.py) if you're interested! There was probably a better way to handle it, but I was implementing the difficulty scaling right up to the end so didn't have much time to fine-tune.
Ha! Finally made it. That final stretch is intense. Amazing entry. Can't believe this is a compo game.
I think I found a bug though. I don't know how to recreate it, but I somehow died right after having collected a time battery. Maybe I died right as I picked it up and it didn't count until after time started ticking again, but I don't know :/
I like the looks of the game. If I had to nitpick a little, one complaint would be that some text looks smooth, while some does not. It's really not that big of a thing though.
The music was also good. I feel like it fit the mood of impending doom that seems impossible to stop.
Overall it was a fun experience playing your game :)
I have seen that bug before --- I think it might happen if you grab the battery exactly as the time runs out. Unfortunately I ran out of time to investigate further because it seemed really rare.
> some text looks smooth, while some does not
I think this is because some text is being rendered by PyGame and some of the text is actually images being loaded in. I think I had antialiasing disabled in my image editor since I was doing pixel art. Oops!
As others have mentioned though, the platform/battery generation felt a bit too random & unfair: I felt like most of the times I died were because I had a too long sequence of platforms without batteries, or the only platform being too close to the bottom. Also, there were a few rare instances where a platform was directly below/above a battery, and when I tried taking the battery, I ended up hooking to the platform instead, leading to a loss.
Lastly, while the intro text implied an ending, it was pretty easy to miss the "thousand feet" line and think it was endless - I only noticed it when I restarted the game after a few tries. Perhaps showing the goal somewhere in the UI, or even counting the feet backwards like your previous game, would help?
Other than that, really awesome entry!
Thanks for pointing out the "thousand feet" UI piece... I actually did have plans to add UI for that initially. The clocktower graphic in the intro sequence was originally going to be a little map on the side with a "you are here" indicator that goes up. Ultimately I didn't like how it looked in the mock-up and scrapped it, but definitely feel similarly about the need. Maybe a simple "out of 1000ft" on the game over screen would have done it.
And platform/battery generation is definitely a common theme. Definitely something to design more deliberately next time!
I can't believe how perfect the difficulty was. It took a little bit to get used to, then once it clicked it was just satisfying and fun and exciting.
Bravo and best of luck! My team (myself included) loved the art that you made of Raidar!!!
As others have mentioned, making the platforms and batteries more sparse as the game goes on can make it a bit frustrating towards the end, but dying and restarting are so seamless and quick that I hardly minded. As long as the game didn't screw me on platform placement, I welcomed the challenge towards the top as it sometimes required new strategies like grabbing a battery while still rising to continue your ascent. It also would have been super cool to have an endless mode with a leaderboard, but that might be ambitious for a compo entry.
The graphics are great (I really like the grappling hook animation), the sound design is simplistic but great, the game feel is great, and the replayability is great. This is definitely a contender for one of the best in the compo!
