Astro's Ladder by alec
One small step (ladder) for mankind, one giant leap for Astro the Astronaut! Traverse micro sized planetary puzzles with the help of Astro's trusty ladder.
Controls
Use ◀️ and ▶️ to walk around planet
🅰️ button to pickup Ladder. Press 🅰️ again to drop it
While holding, you can use 🔼 and 🔽 to adjust grip point height. Press ❎ and 🇾 to shift your grip point along the ladder.
Place the ladder on 2 Planets, then press 🅱️ to begin climbing the ladder! Press 🅱️ again to try and get off, though you'll need to be close enough to a planet.
Reach the Red flag in each level to progress. There are 6 levels.
If you get stuck, restart the game with Control+R. The game saves you're level progress so it should send you back into the correct level.
Have fun!
Here’s the button mapping if you’re using a keyboard
- Arrow keys for movement
- “Z” on keyboard to pickup/drop ladder
- “X” on keyboard get on/off ladder to climb
Here's the cartridge if you'd like to play offline, or explore the source!
Made in TIC-80 , written in the Janet Language, for Ludum Dare 54
Post Submission Patch 1: fixed gamesave not loading correct level correctly on restart.
| Link | https://git.sr.ht/~alect/fantasy-console-carts/blob/main/astros-ladder.janet |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/astros-ladder |
Ratings
| Overall | 60th | 3.983⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 72th | 3.867⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 23th | 4.3⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 134th | 3.85⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 34th | 4.25⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 9th | 4.2⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 108th | 3.161⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 51th | 3.879⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 48🗨️ |
I found the movement and shifting of the ladder hard at first, but got there.
Great submission
In any case, I'll add some native builds for people to download which should run faster then the browser build.
1. hitting escape to bring up the pause screen
2. going to options
3. adjusting the volume toggle (0 is muted)
just in case you run into any tic80 games in the future :wink:
I haven't run into TIC-80 before now, I guess it's similar in concept to PICO-8. I'm going to dig in and learn more later on today, I love this kind of thing.
Just a quick bug report though, probably more for TIC than you @alec but I can't get it to start at all in firefox. I get the white play button in front of the dark blue background, and nothing happens no matter I do. I was able to play it in Chrome however.
good:
- very interesting and unique gameplay
- great graphics and music; especially clear style for the art and it's all really polished, especially for a game jam
bad:
- possible to get stuck on ladders you've hoisted up
- physics/controls feel a bit janky/unintuitive (but I guess that's part of learning the game, and sort of fun, so maybe this isn't a real criticism)
Although there are a few minor issues, like occasionally getting stuck after climbing up a ladder and not being able to come back down even when in the same position.
Overall it's a fantastic game.
I'm not sure I totally understood the rules behind moving the ladder when it's in the hands, but I managed to complete the game somehow. 😅
The ladder refuses to move sometimes and this can get frustrating. I had to restart the game once due to a softlock-like situation.
This game is quite clever in many ways. The sound design is one of my most favorite thing here.
The puzzles themselves are somewhat simple in a sense that they usually can be completed by a trial and error without any real planning; but that's a very common issue with puzzle-like games that were made in a very limited time window. This game does show its main mechanic and that mechanic is quite impressive.
Sometimes the ladder wanted to do it's own thing but I was hitting it off everything :sweat_smile:
Maybe it was because I played on keyboard, but I had a bit of trouble moving the ladders where I wanted them. I especially did not know how I could move them up and down. The character seemed to just do that on their own sometimes. Pressing the up and down arrows sometimes helped, but sometimes did not. Anyway, I really liked the puzzle design, where you had to figure out how to get the ladder to the right place to get to the flag. I had a lot of fun :D