The chronicles of Mr. Marmo by Wouter52
The mad scientist is not satisfied with having blown up the moon! He certainly lost his marbles, now getting his drainage system ready to drain the seven seas for the treassure that lays in its dephts.
Goal:
Via exploration discover all pipe puzzles, connect them and when all are done seek the valve at the bottom of the sea to drain the ocean. Be careful for the beasts that will harm you, mad scientist. Either they make you drop the pearls, you thought were your marbles, or force you to restart the level if you don't have any pearls anymore.
Highscore:
Drain all seven seas and earn a spot on the highscore table! Also, every level got it's own highscore table
Controls:
- Explore: Arrow keys
- Swim up/speed: Spacebar
- Puzzles: Mouse to click
- Reset player: R-key
Watch out for these!
Pearls and clams are your friends
These can hide pearls
Trivia:
- The song that plays at the start at each level was supposed to be temporary, but playtesters liked it and I did not have time to make something more serious, so there you go :)
- Mr Marmo is supposed to be "Marbles" translated into italian. But I accidentally translated "Marble", the white stone. And the game contains pearls instead of marbles, so the name is not related at all anymore :grin:
Version control:
- V1.1
- Highscores displayed as Ascending instead of Descending. I fixed that
- Fixed two bugs on main menu screen: after gameover the screen would go dark + Alignment issues
- Added Reset Key in the case you get stuck
- V1.2
- Fixed big problem regarding colissions. There was a bug that people were talking about. It was an easy fix but a lot of investigationwork to find out. See post here for explaination what it was, how it happened and what I did to fix it: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/the-chronicles-of-mr-marmo/mom-weve-got-colission-system-at-home
| Link | https://www.wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD57/PLAY/MrMarmo.zip |
| Play here | https://www.wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD57/PLAY/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/the-chronicles-of-mr-marmo |
Ratings
| Overall | 455th | 3.532⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 439th | 3.387⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 508th | 3.129⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 394th | 3.767⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 432th | 3.661⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 309th | 3.516⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 154th | 3.613⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 509th | 3.452⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
A few minor problems: It wasn't completely clear to me where to stand to solve the pipe puzzles and it took me a while to realize that all the fish were enemies and that you have to jump before swimming (though that might just be me). I also ran into a bug where I got hit by a fish while I was standing on a rock and got stuck in the rock?
It's great that you liked the puzzles. It was a bit of an experiment to make them into the gameworld itself, which turned out pretty neat if you ask me :-) It's not really explained how to do the puzzles, I hope the yellow platforms will bring out the curiosity of the player, like it eventually did for you :-)
The colissions are a bit wonky, I made it myself :grin:
I'm sorry you got stuck. In version 1.1 I made a reset key, so you can "unstuck" yourself. I also changed the introduction page above, to explain who to look out for. Is that more clear now? Future players will read that I hope :)
The colissions are a bit wonky, I made it myself grin I’m sorry you got stuck. In version 1.1 I made a reset key, so you can “unstuck” yourself.
In October I should be here again indeed!
So I created a backstory to explain! *Mr. Marmo not only blew up the moon back in his day, he also emptied all of the world-supply of caffeine-powdered-coffee into the ocean.* So, those poor sea horses are drugged with a caffeine overdose :grinning:
As a few others mentioned, it took me a little while to realize that you need to stand on the stone blocks to start working the pipes - no biggy once you realize whats happening. I also got stuck a few times on a few tiles (but the 'R' key lets you reset, so again no problems really).
I love the animation/idea that the ocean drains down to the level of the pipe when you finish a level - I think the effect would have been perfect if the next level started from the last level drain position.
Well done
It is indeed the mario underwater theme. During development I had a little orange mario character as a testing sprite. I also drew lots of inspiration from mario bros 1 for the swimming mechanics.
Great that you could instantly pick it up and play! Over the years I learned a bit what to explain and what to just leave up to the player to find out
The physics are a bit wonky indeed. I need to experiment for a bit to make sure the post-jam version won't have this problem. I suspect that this is going to annoy lots of players :sweat_smile:
There are secret areas where you can enter to reach those marbles (I placed them by hand so I think you mean those). Those areas have a checked background
Its nice to know that the stonebricks are found out eventually. I tried to make level 1 soft of a tutorial level :)
The animation of the sea draining was a few hours of work to make perfect. I thought it would be a core gameplay element, so it had to be spot-on. I love your idea of starting at the same level as the previous level! Altough, now you can play the levels out of order :thinking: That could open up some cool oppotunities, where some levels are too dark at the bottom, so you need to comlete another first to reach even deeper :heart_eyes: (just thinking out loud here)
Nice work as usual!
Did the outbound pearls appear in "hidden area's"?
I made some hidden area's where the wall texture is checkered :) Thanks for the compliments! This was my first attempt of making some unique levels within a gamejam without using randomness. So it means a lot that you like the level designs!
Btw I watched your timelapse, I think it's awesome that you did that. I will try to do that too next time. How often did you take a screenshot?
I'm glad you had fun! I'll be addressing the bug later today or tomorrow when I got time. I know hoe to fix it now after some sherlocking around. I'll update the code as v1.2, as I think this is important enough to fix without classifying it as a post-jam version. For transparancy I will do a deep dive-post about the inner workings of my home-made collision code and how I fixed it and why the pearls messed it up even if there are no pearls in the direct vicinity
As of the "art" haha, glad you had a good chuckle out of it :grin: I think it works like chocolate: a little bit and you want more, a whole chocolatebar and you'll regret it. Sometimes the art is that you crave for more without getting some
Here is a post explaining how it worked and what went wrong if you're curious: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/the-chronicles-of-mr-marmo/mom-weve-got-colission-system-at-home
Oh and as for the secret areas, I didn't find any, or I have but I thought I just clipped trough the floor lol.
This was such a clever blend of "water level" with puzzles that were genuinely interesting-yet-not-impossible and dodging enemies. Well done!
And I'm fourth place right now whoooooooooo!
Good job!
The sink is sometimes pretty hidden indeed, Only consistancy: it's at the bottom of the level :grin:
Self hosting I think is fun, it gives me full control over every pixel on the users screen if I want to :grinning:
P.s. I love the GIF you made!
I suppose I can start a solo acapella group 🤔😆 I'm glad that it made you happy! I almost scrapped it as it was meant to be for development, I wanted to exchange it for something more serious at the end. But then Javascript decsided to crap its pants and lay down for about 1,5 hours when I found out that the Highscoretable would randomly not load the correct data. Never had that issue, but then again, I never had multiple highscoretables in one game before. Fixing that took my time away to make some "real" music. I'm glad it is this way, lots of people get a kick of of it
Congratz on your highscore!!!
It is a combination of collection, exploration, pipe dream-style puzzles, and a bit of a flappy bird that works very well. It must have taken quite some discipline and experience to program this without dying (or at least I wish you a speedy recovery if you did). It was exciting to realize from the very first level that what seemed to be a secret area is in fact one, promising further exploration opportunity throughout levels.
The graphics is enchanting, beautiful shapes and pastel-like colors, even the background which seems just a single-color gradient but features graininess that adds some magic.
Excellent work, thanks for making this.
But it was quite a nice platformer concept (even sent it to my friend from outside of the game jam to test it out). Great job on your entry!
The controls a bit too janky for me. You generally move very slowly, but get the "bursts" of speed when you jump. I've found it too inconsistent to have fun navigating the levels. If you just made the base character speed higher and lowered the sudden velocity gain, just to make it more consistent, I think it would really help.
Just one thing, is that at the beginning I often spawned on a enemy and got almost insta-kill :(
Very nice otherwise :thumbsup:
I did not feel dead luckaly, I always take mondays and tuesdays off from work so I could sleep in :-) I'm glad you liked it! I was looking forward for your feedback! Its always so honest and I love that. You're not afraid to kick us in the butt for making a PEPE-game :laughing:
Between NIGHTLY_09 and NIGHTLY_10 I designed the levels. That is including cooking and eating lunch and dinner :-)
https://wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD57/NIGHTLY_BUILDS/
Thanks for the big compliments! The as mentioned above, the levels where relatively easy to make. Although, my GF was like: *whyyyyy are you making so many levels* and I was like *because there are seven seas!* :grin:
The second level has a bit of a designproblem I think, you're not the first one that mentiones that. Luckaly it won't affect the highscore btw. If you die, everything is reset.
Jumping out of the water is not supported in this game, as I had to make walking animation sprites and I did not want to do that :grin:
The stopping of time is a nice addition indeed, you can thank @lizz for that, she came with the suggestion. If you watch closely, the sea creatures make little Z-shaped bubbles when pausing, so signify that the're paused :innocent:
Thanks for the big compliment! I think it is awesome that this game gets some players from outside of the LD community!
Luckaly dying will reset the level and also the score. It won't affect the highscore at the end :-)
After a couple levels it did become a little repetitive, so I must admit that I did not make it to the later levels. That being said, it was fun while I played it :D Great submission!
> This is one of my favorite entries for this 57th LudumDare session.
That is a big compliment, and I thank you for that!
@lizz is a good influence indeed, she helped a lot researching some facts about the seven seas and she play tested a lot :smile:
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@wuppos Thank you! I must say: I never was really conscious about color-theory in this game. I only made critical object bright colors to make them stand out in the depths of the ocean :grin: I know what you mean about repetitiveness, especially as the levels go deeper and deeper. At the moment I don't really know how to fix that. Do you have suggestions?
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@binaryprinciple Thank you so much! I was thinking about some expansions, but I don't want it to get stale. Also, I want to upgrade the underlaying code before I'll do that :)
The puzzle is triggered by the yellow platforms that are in the area, maybe I should have made that clear in the first level. The plants are just there to be background graphics and to hide pearls and enemies sometimes :)
Thank you for playing and streaming!
I hope I am not being too critical! Those are just some thoughts I had, but I am by no means an expert. Just trying to learn alongside you :)
Very well done!
I like the graphics and the puzzles. I didn't immediately realize I need to use the mouse click (maybe a hotkey or a visual hint when I am near would suffice) but ones I did it made all sense!
I also like the entire chuu-chuu tracks / very nice :D and the coin-like marble grabbing. : ))
GJ!
If you'll continue development perhaps you could go ahead and cover SMB3's and DKC's respective underwater-themes too? :stuck_out_tongue: :musical_note: :potable_water:
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Appreciate you've coded the whole thing yourself! :clap:
Since you're a system programmer, I thought you might be interested in my tongue-in-cheek low-end CPU "benchmark-test."
(...which basically means I just happened to try your game on my **ancient** dumpster-hardware.)
```
OS: Lubuntu 20.04.6 LTS
Hardware: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 2.40 GHz, 4GB RAM, MCP89-GPU
Browser: Mozilla Firefox 136.0 (64-bit)
```
I noticed that the game slows down *drastically* in these three levels: **2,4,5.**
My first thought was that it has something to do with the level-size or perhaps the "darkness/depth"-effect. But I think there must be something else to it?
If you want to optimize or feel otherwise intrigued you could try to find out what might be causing it. The levels **1,3,6,7** seemed to work "normally" in my user-experience.
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As for the gameplay I don't have much to add what others haven't already pointed out before.
I like the way you've combined puzzles and platforming. The rotation-puzzles are fun and easy to solve even though they seem daunting at the first glance.
The core-idea of draining the water could probably be innovated further; for example it would be interesting if the player could explore the drained level by jumping around. Designing levels with that approach would be a challenge in itself though, but just food for thought!
The code that determines the darkness of the rendering is calculated every gametick and is based on the diffrence between the water level and the Y position of the player. So that should be a constant between levels.
The amount of pearls, plants and enemies change each level, however: I can't find significant variations between the amounts. I have to debug myself on one of my potatoe pc's to find the root cause.
The idea of exploring after draining crossed my mind, it could be very interesting to try that in a post-jam version maybe 🤔 Although, now there is a clear finish, so I have to think about how that should work maybe. Someone else had another idea: start the next level at the drainlevel where the previous ended. That way one could play with diffrent play-orders :)
Thanks again! That was really interesting and I apreciate your time and effort.
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@lereveur so great to see you here! Thank you for your kind and honest feedback! Indeed, programmer art can be so much more than only graphics :grin:
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@aweskybear Thanks for your feedback! I tried making clear that the mouse can be used to put a little indicator at the top left of the screen. Where would you expect such a thing? Above the player maybe?
Thanks for dropping the link on my stream! Enjoyed playing it and even got the nice score or 1555!
I really liked the lighting as you went deeper.
Congrats!
I didn't say I really appreciated the depth and darkening effect. : ))
@0x-void-x0 thanks for giving some extra context in the chat my friend, that was really nice of you! I watched gamedevdad play your game too, that was really cool to see!
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@aweskybear no problem no problem :) I apreciate your feedback! Usually for every person who points something out, there are five people who do not but experience the same difficulties. So next time I know that I need to think harder about the indicators. Also I agree what you mean with activating the puzzles when you get near them, instead of having to stand in a specific spot
Thanks for pointing out the depth darkening effect! It was a headache to implement, as I needed to calculate the darkness of every pixel without bit overflows and stuff. Otherwise the colors would all get wonky :sweat_smile:
A DM function on this website would be a cool addition for that (@pov ? :grin: )
You can always reach me via email: wouter@wouter52.com, although I think that is only useful in the off-season. As I check the LD website as often as my email I think :innocent:
Determined, I decided to replay the first level as many times as necessary to claim the top spot.
Sometimes I spawned directly on the fish, and other times I got stuck and couldn’t move—like when you're about to collect the last pearl under the drainer. The game prompts you to drain it, but there’s no option to cancel.
Thanks!
Thanks for all the feedback, I now know to make the start of the level "safe". The enemies start at a random location somewhere around where the're placed into the level data files. That is a bit too random and then players die just after spawning :o
And regarding the pearls... Oops? I thought I was clever by disabling controls when the player was on the platform :grin: I'll remember this for next time!
Turns out: I have a pickups-file where the red pixels are the pearls. I also have a transparant black outline of the rest of the level in there to make pearl placement much easier. However, in levels 2, 4 and 5 that outline is partly gray and because of that thousands of "ghost objects" are created. All of those somehow get rendered as transparant squares :no_mouth:
Gotta love how javascript just trucks on :laughing:
I won't fix it, as nobody else seems to mind, but it is interesting nevertheless